I Timothy 1:20,21
Keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: which some professing have erred concerning the faith.
WILLIAM BUELL SPRAGUE (1795-1876): Who can estimate the amount of evil which a bad book is adapted to produce? Let it be read and relished, and it will be almost sure to be read more than once—read till it has impressed itself most fully on the mind, and its poison has diffused itself through the whole moral system.
MARTYN LLOYD-JONES (1899-1981): There is the theory of Evolution, for instance, which the average man takes for granted now, a century or so after the publication of Charles Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species―that one book, I suppose, has been more responsible for undermining people’s faith and belief in the Scriptures, and in God’s way of salvation, than any other single book.
A. W. PINK (1886-1952): The lie of evolution captivated the scientific world.
PHILIP MAURO (1859-1952): Although sometimes spoken of as a “scientific” theory, evolution is not scientific; for science has to do only with facts. Evolution belongs wholly in the realm of speculative philosophy. The basic assumption of this theory is that all things in nature—living and not living—had a common origin; and that all the diverse elements, compounds, and organisms were developed by the cumulative effect of changes, in themselves imperceptibly small, all of which changes were brought about by the energy of “forces resident in nature.” The theory assumes the existence of Matter and Force, without attempting to account for the origin of either…Thus, to begin with, the evolutionist makes no pretence that his theory can explain the origin of either Matter or Force. The existence of these he must take for granted, and attribute them to an unknowable first cause.
JOHN GILL (1697-1771): “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” Genesis 1:1. The world was not eternal, either as to the matter or form of it, as Aristotle, and some other philosophers, have asserted, but it had a beginning; and its being is not owing to the fortuitous motion and conjunction of atoms, but to the power and wisdom of God, the first cause and sole Author of all things.
MARTYN LLOYD-JONES: Quite apart from my believing the Bible to be the inspired and authoritative word of God, on scientific grounds alone I have never been able to accept the theory of evolution. The difficulties I am left with, if I accept the theory of evolution, are altogether greater than the few residual difficulties I am left with when I accept the biblical record.
PHILIP MAURO: The theory of Evolution, as an universal or cosmic process, requires us to believe that the entire organic world emerged, at some past era, from the inorganic. Surely, if such were indeed the case, then the latter would contain abundant evidences thereof, showing how individual entities, with their characteristic life changes, came into existence. And not only so, but we should also find everywhere inorganic groupings of atoms gradually reaching forth towards organic existence; and most certainly it would be possible by laboratory methods to transform the one into the other…Going on further we come to creatures having that mysterious thing called “Life.” Does Evolution account for the origin of that? Quite the contrary; Darwin himself declared that spontaneous generation is “absolutely inconceivable.”
THOMAS WATSON (1620-1686): To create requires infinite power. All the world cannot make a fly.
PHILIP MAURO: Evolution raises the monstrous and impious fiction that Man was made in the image and likeness of the ape, by means of an unbroken continuity of changes imperceptibly small. There is much talk about “the missing link.” But such talk is nonsensical.
C. H. SPURGEON (1834-1892): After all these years in which so many people have been hunting up and down the world for “the missing link” between animals and men, among all the monkeys that the wise men have examined, they have never discovered one who has rubbed his tail off, and ascended in the scale of creation so far as to take his place as the equal of our brothers and sisters of the great family of mankind.
PHILIP MAURO: Moreover, it obscures the facts of the case, for it is not a mere “link” that is missing, but ten thousand times ten thousand links.
C. H. SPURGEON: What the advocates of evolution appear to forget is, that there is nowhere to be discovered an actual chain of growth from one creature to another—there are breaks here and there, and so many missing links that the chain cannot be made complete…You remember how it is distinctly stated, again and again, that the Lord made each creature “after his kind.” So we read, “And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good,” Genesis 1:21. And again, verse 25, “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”
JOHN GILL: “And the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind,” verse 11; as apples, pears, plums, apricots, nectars, peaches, oranges, lemons, etc., “whose seed is in itself;” each of which produce a seed according to the nature of them, which being sown produces the like, and so there is a continuance of them upon the earth.
ADAM CLARKE (1760-1832): Every thing both in the animal and vegetable world was made so according to its kind, both in genus and species, as to produce its own kind through endless generations. Thus the several races of animals and plants have been kept distinct from the foundation of the world to the present day.
C. H. SPURGEON: There are, naturally enough, many resemblances between them, because they have all been wrought by the one great master-mind of God, yet each one has its own peculiarities. Look at the union between the animal and the bird in the bat, or think of the resemblance between a bird and a fish in the flying fish; yet, nobody, surely, would venture to tell you that a fish ever grew into a bird, or that a bat ever became a butterfly or an eagle…All the evolutionists in the world cannot “improve” a mouse so that it will develop into a cat, or evolve a golden eagle out of a barn-door fowl. Even where one species very closely resembles another, there is a speciality about each which distinguishes it from all others.
Does Revelation teach us evolution? It never has struck me, and it does not strike me now, that the theory of evolution can, by any process of argument, be reconciled with the inspired record of the Creation.
THOMAS WATSON: Creation is both a monument of God’s power and looking glass in which we may see His wisdom.
